How I learned about 9/11

I didn't watch TV that morning. At one point, I turned on the radio and heard a reporter talking about an emergency at the Pentagon, and, not interested in what I thought was a routine problem, turned off the radio. Around noon, I went to the Giant supermarket up the street. A woman ahead of me in the checkout line said to the checkout clerk (Adam Skillings), "Will you be open tonight?" Skillings said, "I haven't heard anything." Again routine. Then Skillings said, "I'm surprised something like this hasn't happened before now." Didn't think anything about it. Went home and turned on the TV. NBC reporter David Bloom was recapping the events of the morning. I remember he used the word "disgusting" to describe the attack. Wow, was I shocked! So, the later acquired information caused my mind to reprocess what I thought were trivial, unrelated facts from earlier, and those seemingly trivial facts from earlier in the morning were imprinted in my conscious memory as having traumatic significance. But they weren't traumatic at the time I learned the facts. Odd.

Freud had a name for that phenomenon. Nachträglichkeit.